Did These Two Women Ever Talk

Hot on the heels of my finishing Tempted Women by Botwin, I quickly read another pop psych book, Secret Loves by Sonya Friedman, also written in the early 90s. Friedman is 180 degrees turned from Botwin, finding her subject in married women with long term, relatively successful affairs. Unlike Botwin's world where the women are tempted by bosses and fellow workers, the women in Friedman's book find love sometimes at work, but just as often when returning to college or even in a grocery store aisle.

Her theme is that these women find what their marriage lacks in their lovers, but at the same time, so focused on the financial and cultural states of their families that do not plan to divorce. (Well, maybe the lesbians do, statistical outlyers that they are.)

In contrast to straying husbands who seduce single women, Friedman finds these long term affairs are most often with married men who are equally adverse to breaking up their families.

So where does she come down? Being so very modern and liberal, she does not condemn such women, after all the evidence of their happiness and fulfillment is almost overwhelming, but she wraps up by saying these women should pass on to their daughters the advice to "know thyself" first so that they don't marry in haste and find their emotional lives lacking. How Pollyana.

Once again since I finished most of the book last night, and also finished The Reliable Wife, which suprisingly for a book club book was actually very well written and captivating, almost Shakespearean in its tragedies and passions. So my mind wandered into the celestial heavens, thinking of the alignment of the sun, moon and earth and using eclipses as a metaphor for human loves. The earth is convention, societal morals, and rootedness. It gets in the way periodically of the other two attractions in the sky. The sun is regularity and productivity. The moon, on the other hand, calls to us in the darkness, waxing and waning and luring us with its mystery. When the earth blocks out the sun, it creates almost a black hole of nothingness; but in a full lunar eclipse, like the one earlier this winter, the moon turns passionate blood red. The sun is a woman's spouse, the moon her lover. Who is Friedman to say one is better than the other, one optional.